Look. Le Bernadin. Wooow. This guys wanted to jump into the kitchen and just watch how the chef made magic. Even though i had to grab a proper jacket, i was too comfortable with someone waiting on me hand and foot. I mostly had fish plates since i am fish eating monster. The dripping of butter from my mouth only briefly describes the feeling in my tummy. The desert made an impact but did nothing to grab my attention like the tea i drank. I am not even sure what i was drinking that was so tasty. They said City Harvest and yet i fell in love with a tea for the first time. Food is a medicine and will kill me all at the same time. Le Bernadin, i want to thank you for a tremendous meal that made my tummy go yummy. Oh, by the way check out two things---Mixed Babies at 105 Rivington in the LES with Eli Escobar. Doing big things. Plus, Brik Mason will be featured with Bryan Dunn in August. Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

I am trying to get my passport stamped in all places awesome. if i need to Dj there, hit me up. Put in work for a year and maybe i can do that. Just landed a few gigs here and there but by next month, i hope to be inserting new music into the atmosphere. Call me work all the time man. Sometime money gets in the way of it all. A friend of mine is spening $3300 on a cruise to Spain, Italy, France and back. As much as boats intrigue, i'd rather fly. Call me Peter Pan. But i understand her fear of planes. Well not really but she is a litte scared of it all. Plus she can spend time with her mother in order to see the world. A goal of mine is to get to certain cities in Europe, Africa, Asia and travel through different countries for a month with music/plays. However, i need to hit the studion sooner than later. if you see me in the streets, tell me to Get in the studio. Get to work. Throw an event. Travel the world or basically harden the f...ck up. oh yeah, if you have new music, hit me up.

ONDON, England (CNN) -- A zombie movie made using a camcorder for less then the price of a DVD box set is set to be distributed in cinemas across the UK."Colin" director Marc Price who spent 18 months making the film, working nights at a private car hire firm.

"Colin" director Marc Price who spent 18 months making the film, working nights at a private car hire firm.Click to view previous image1 of 2Click to view next image

"Colin," made by budding British director, Marc Price, will now get its own DVD as well as hitting the big screen in time for Halloween alongside Hollywood blockbusters like "Zombieland."

"It's kind of scary in a cool way," says Price of his success on a shoestring.

Price wrote, directed, shot and edited "Colin" over 18 months while working nights at a taxi company.

The 30-year-old first-time director says he managed to make the film for so little by advertising for volunteer zombies on social networking site, Facebook.

He also borrowed make-up and taught himself special effects by endlessly re-watching making-of featurettes and director's commentaries from his personal DVD collection.

Price says he spent the $70 on "a crowbar and a couple of tapes, and some tea and coffee -- just to keep the zombies happy."

Since "Colin's" success Price has been contacted by hundreds of fledgling filmmakers from around the world inspired to try making their own films despite a lack of money.Don't Miss

"That's the best bit," he said. "That someone like me at 16, wondering how they can make their movie will see mine and think, 'My mobile has better resolution than his camcorder.'

"Hopefully there's a chance that other filmmakers will make use of what resources they have to tell the best story they can."

Price says he will be putting his own making-of featurette on the "Colin" DVD to help young directors.

"We will blow the lid on all of our little tips and tricks," he told CNN. "The illusion will be completely destroyed, but I think it's important that other people see what we did."

"Colin" ingeniously spins the zombie genre on its head by telling the story entirely from the zombie's perspective. It follows Colin, played by Alastair Kirton, who slowly transforms into a zombie after being bitten.The Screening RoomBringing you the inside track on all aspects of the movie business around the globe.See more from the show »

Kaleidoscope Entertainment picked up the film after it generated buzz among distributors at Cannes film festival earlier this year -- many of whom were astonished to find out quite how little money was spent on making the film.

"Colin" will be released in between 6 and 15 cinemas across the UK, as well as showing at a number of festivals. There are currently no plans for international cinema distribution.

Price has now moved on to his next project, which he describes as a World War II drama with a horror element. "It's even got a creature at the end," he said.

The script is written, the cast is in place -- they even have a composer. Now all he needs is funding. "We'll need funding, not much, but a hell of a lot more than for 'Colin,'" Price added.

Monday, July 27, 2009

The Diddy machine works in full force. We are mad. We hate. We still watch as he makes his chess moves. We get mad again. And cry. Sometimes it is heartfelt to see Diddy in a movie that Halle Berry won a Best Actress Award for in the land of all lands. Then i think of the numerous amount of moguls out there who are just like Diddy and who came before Diddy. Quincy Jones. Russell Simmons. Richard Branson. Should we shout out the differences. We know the challenges those guys faced. Racism. Punks. Queens. Money issues. Ballon Crashes. This will never sell issues. We love those guys because they overcame and push the limits and allowed us to experience what many now call music(it saved some lives..ask Raekwon) and what many rejected as nonsense. I am not saying i am on Diddy's side. Because as my friends said while we sitting a room licking ice cream and drinking some good Chilean wine, what has Diddy done lately for music. Not much. Check out Red Cafe. New York rapper. Put in the years, made the connects, waited his time like a good little rapper. Now he releases himself into the wild. oh yeah.......he is signed to Bad Boy Records. Sorry.

VALISA AND JAMES TATE were among the first residents to move into One Brooklyn Bridge Park, a condominium project in Brooklyn Heights, in the summer of 2008. A year later, the hallways still feel barren. Only 77 of the building’s 438 apartments have closed. Twenty-six are in contract.Skip to next paragraphJessica Ebelhar/The New York Times

Celine and Manny Enriquez are owners there and unperturbed by renters. “The property will appreciate well enough,” Mr. Enriquez says.

In order to keep money coming in during a difficult time for sales, the developer, the RAL Companies, has begun renting out some of the apartments. The first tenants moved in this month.

“It’s a great project,” said Robert A. Levine, the president of RAL. “But we’re subject to the real world. The real world is such that financing is an issue for buyers, sale of their current residences is an issue for buyers. All of those factors enter in and slow down the process.”

In the face of the recession, many buildings that began life as condominiums have converted to rentals. But what RAL is doing at One Brooklyn Bridge Park — and what many other developers of new condos may begin doing in the coming months — is slightly different. The building becomes a kind of hybrid, a condominium with renters in the mix.

“If the developer can’t sell, he makes this decision with his lender,” said Andy Gerringer, who runs the development marketing group at Prudential Douglas Elliman. “They agree together that in order to get cash flow, they’re going to rent units.”

Most condominiums have few restrictions on renting out apartments. Traditionally, individual condo owners have been the landlords. But when developers turn to renting apartments, it’s often on a large scale. Regardless of whom tenants are renting from, potential buyers tend to shy away from buildings that are renter-heavy.

Check out the rest of the article over at NYtimes.com. If rappers are really making money like they say, then this should be a easy move. Peace out to Camp Lo. doing big things on their own for years.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

1711999114_09e874cd74_m Insight, Ideas, Impact... those are the steps we take to achieve successful marketing campaigns. As always, I have proof. Check out what we did with Activision for the release of Call of Duty 4. Again, most agencies talk a good game about experiential marketing. Here's how The Reason makes it happen.

Insight.

The Call of Duty franchise already had a loyal, captive following - the hard-core gamer. As always, the key for the Reason was to identify the most relevant rituals where we could add value. We decided to target key rituals for these gamers -- frequent visits to onine gaming communities and local GameStop stores.

Ideas.

The goal was simple -- elevate game to "must have" status. Based on Insight, we produced and managed 10 simultaneous events at GameStop locations in top 10 U.S. markets. These high impact events provided customers an exclusive opportunity to play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare single-player before it was released to the public.

Here's a granular look at what we did:

* Campaign Theme. Created unifying tagline "The Evolution is Here" to anchor the entire campaign across all mediums. * Digital Promotions. Developed online messaging to virally promote events via message boards and blogs * Point of Sales. Created in-store promotional signage and event invitations which were distributed at retail * Guerilla Marketing. Wild postings and hand-to-hand distribution of event invites

Impact.

Events received media coverage by G4-TV, Ain’t It Cool News, Weekend Distractions, Media Geeks, and GameStop TV. Oh by the way, COD4 also went on to become the best first person shooter game of all time. Doesn't get more "must have" than that. Those guys created a great game and I'm glad we could create memorable experiences for gamers across the country.

Ok, first off..lets shout to the movie Aliens. Awesome. Epic and still fucking scary. No arguments. After watching the Jon Hurt(Mr.Potter Wizard etc.) alien bust out of his chest and run away. Whoa. Such great set design. The sound is what makes me jump. One of the best. On top of that, my roommate just linked me up to a Chopper Reed sketch from the land of Kangoroos. Epic. Check out Youtube and Chopper Reed. If anything, go watch the movie Chopper and hardening the fuck up. Peace out to Johnny Day.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Big up to Murs. He put me on this new slash old dude from Cali. Dom Kennedy. Check the method over at Alwayshustle.com. Btw, Phils on a unreal streak. Love it or leave it alone. Bruno's Pizza, i still love u.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Tell me more, Tell me more, did she make it really hard. This is a line i sampled from Summer Nights. yes, the same one from Grease. I am in my office and i hear this line. I say hold up. Did she make it really hard? Ok, so the obvious thought is did she make IT hard. The pure crowd might say She was playing hard to get. Another move is what if she did make it hard. Was Mr Travolta and crew going to commit a crime to get to the promise land. i mean really people. I almost want to say Grease is the reason why dudes wiil do anything for IT. Or maybe i should stop smoking dope at work.....

Monday, July 20, 2009

What is the matter with your life, did he put your million dollar check in someone's elses mailbox. Thats Poplife. Many circumstances encompass POP Life. You can relate the life of guns to pop life. The life of many rappers deal with pop life. Mr. Pacman deals with POP life. Britney, Madonna, and the Jackson deal and dealt with POp Life. We all need a space to fill and a space for thrills. How much can thrills be apart of your life. I say live the madness of life to the fullest but for some that means to be careful in every moment. Hmmm. Currently i am reading THE WATCHMAN and i know the story but it is still intriguing. The graphics are incredibly but i have to say Hollywood did a pretty good job with capturing the outfits and the craziness of their world. The movie was a tad bit long and like most movies, a few items were left out. Maybe the gruesome reality was all the film makers cared to capture. Not sure. Ok, that is enough for now. My brain is on pause due to my new hairdo. HA. Check out Ras Kass new song over at ONSMASH.com.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

So i am recovering from a great house/rooftop party last night. It was nice to get out in the city and smelling the air of a lovely day. A lovely day it was. Costumes representing the roaring 20's came into effect but for the most part, people just rolled through in their plain gear. The Dj spun a great mix of Fela/Jazz/Funk Fusion with some Madlib and 360 remixes to round out the the night. Although a small percentage of the people were really jamming to the beats, the night still rocked. Some people still go to parties to talk to their own social circles which i find interesting since meeting new people is usually one of the many avenues to approach at a party. But big up to Jim. Solid party. Thanks for the free booze.

Walter Cronkite, an iconic CBS News journalist who defined the role of anchorman for a generation of television viewers, died Friday at the age of 92, his family said.

“My father Walter Cronkite died,” his son Chip said just before 8 p.m. Eastern. CBS interrupted prime time programming to show an obituary for the man who defined the network’s news division.

Mr. Cronkite anchored the “CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981, at a time when television became the dominant medium of the United States. He figuratively held the hand of the American public during the civil rights movement, the space race, the Vietnam war, and the impeachment of Richard Nixon. During his tenure, network newscasts were expanded to 30 minutes from 15.

“It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” Sean McManus, the president of CBS News, said in a statement. “More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.”

Mr. McManus added: “No matter what the news event was, Walter was always the consummate professional with an un-paralleled sense of compassion, integrity, humanity, warmth, and occasionally even humor. There will never be another figure in American history who will hold the position Walter held in our minds, our hearts and on the television. We were blessed to have this man in our lives and words cannot describe how much he will be missed by those of us at CBS News and by all of America.”

Mike Wallace, the “60 Minutes” correspondent emeritus, said simply in a statement, “We were proud to work with him — for him — we loved him.”

Reassurance was Mr. Cronkite’s stock in trade, the ability to convince viewers that when he was on the air all would turn out well.

In a review of Mr. Cronkite’s autobiography in 1997, the former New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote:

When John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas in 1963, Walter Cronkite stayed on the air for the Columbia Broadcasting System for countless hours. His performance that weekend helped pull together a nation stricken with grief and was a signal event in television’s evolution into the national nervous system.

When Mr. Cronkite came back from Vietnam after the Tet offensive of 1968, he concluded on national television that the war had become no better than a stalemate. Hearing that, President Lyndon Johnson told associates, ”If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” And he had. When Mr. Cronkite asked Robert Kennedy, then a senator from New York, whether he would run for President in 1968, Kennedy turned the tables: he proposed that Mr. Cronkite should run for the Senate. Mr. Cronkite refused, but the idea reflected polls showing that a journalist — a television journalist at that — had become the most trusted man in America.

For his exhaustive and enthusiastic coverage of NASA, Mr. Cronkite was sometimes called “the eighth astronaut.” During the first moon landing in 1969, Mr. Cronkite “was on the air for 27 of the 30 hours that Apollo 11 took to complete its mission,” The Museum of Broadcast Communications notes.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

First of all, Happy Birthday to Mike Washington. Sorry i missed the party. Lets talk NY Minute right now. Things happen very fast in the city of Big Juicy Apple. For instance, my boys planning a party for MDW in Bmore. New York Minute. NY execs turing to Junkies. N.O.R.E. losing weight and spitting cocaine rhymes. I mean i could go to a lounge with brazilan babies at one club and later that night end up at a loft chocolate wrestling party. I could grab an improv show and then be in a movie scene with some guy from the wire. NY Minute. Enjoy it. Check out the remix to French Montana's song NY Minute. He says what he says, he is who he is.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Lets talk about Beef. There is a series that has been out for the last 5 or 6 years regarding Beef in the rap industry. Now as an avid Hip Hop fan, i know what Beef is, I heard Biggie rhyme about it and Mos Def change the meaning of what Beef in the span of a few years. I transplanted from a city with the best CheeseSteak on earth. So i know what Beef is. Basically, two crews or rappers or rapper's crews say a few words about another crew and a retaliation is mad(hopefully through words) and so on. Type in Joe Buddens. His Beef is elevating everyday with every rapper. Slaughterhouse. I can't wait. Anyhow, Beef makes it interesting. Beef is like a big ole wrestling match except i can relate to most of the rappers. Well, i do wear tights once in a while. But i wonder, what about rock n roll beef? What about Indie Rock beef? What about dance music beef? I mean i want to see Grizzly Bear say some shit about Silversun Pickups. gimme a battle. Gimme a line. i get it. It is about the music but lets add some drama.

The neo-soul singer Maxwell kept his fans waiting eight years for a new album, but they didn’t forget him. “BLACKsummers’night” (Columbia), Maxwell’s first CD since 2001, opens at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, with 316,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan, his best sales week ever. (Michael Jackson’s collection “Number Ones” sold more, but it does not qualify for the chart.) Another new album, “Hannah Montana 3” (Disney), the third soundtrack to the hit television show, is No. 2 with 137,000 sales. Last week’s top seller, the 31st edition of the pop compilation series “Now That’s What I Call Music!,” fell to No. 3 with 101,000 sales. All Time Low, a pop-punk band from Maryland, bows at No. 4 with its third release, “Nothing Personal” (Hopeless), which sold just less than 63,000 copies, barely more than the Black Eyed Peas’ latest album, “The E.N.D.” (Interscope), which holds at No. 5 in its fifth week out.

Also this week, Lady Gaga’s album “The Fame” (Interscope) has dropped out of the Top 10 for the first time in almost five months. “The Fame” is No. 13 this week with 33,000 sales; since it was released last August, it has sold nearly 1.2 million copies.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Breathing Definition: Respiration; the act of inhaling and exhaling air.

On the another note, this guy is learning about breathing. Now, I just learned from a few runners out there that you should breathe through the nose when running and close your mouth. Meaning inhale and exhale through the nose. It will help with opening up your lungs and lead to better stamina and overall breath control. Now I need to know if this is true. I feel like it is true and i may have to test the theory myself. I am sure singers have known this since the beginning of time. Even when i get too excited, i forget to breath which makes me feel like a man child who is not in control of mouth. I am a big child. Ask my co-workers and my ex-girlfriend. Breathing is essential to letting the right or wrong notes out of your mouth. A singer told me if i sing with tension, it will sound like a mashed cat no matter if you are a struggling singer on Broadway(Rock of Ages) or Pavorotti(RIP) at the MET. Speaking of the Mets, you are in 4th place right now. Lets really call it quits if you are not going to try. Anyhow, remember to breath.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

i forgot that one of the great Damon Wayons movies ever was The Last Boy Scout. Of course, Bruce Willis made a great assist on this one. Naw, he carried the movie. Seriously this is one of the best new Bad Good movies of all time and i forgot it was directed by Tony Scott.(thinking about an Eminem track with Royce the 5"9 called Bad Meets Evil) You know, the guy from Man on Fire fame. Anyhow, this is a great movie to watch after cleaning the crib and a drunken stupor last night with a few friends over at Studio Square Beer garden. Studio Square is in Queens and his bumping like i have never seen it. Only open three months and i am sure it is racking in the doe(cash only). Rappers drop the club idea and build a beer garden fo sure. So i am sitting with my boy John P aka the birthday boy and lay back in the essence of Beer and lovelys. An SG girl was there to represent and she gave me some good hair advice. new color scheme coming soon. BTW, Beer gardens need DJs. Push for it. Check out Tracksuit Mafia at the PIT late night. Peace out. Damn, it is laundry time. and Boom goes the dynamite.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

So my entry today belongs to the moments of the screaming in the rap videos. What i really mean is when someone in music comes up with a distinct laugh or scream or movement. It always draws me in. Even when i think the artist sucks, i always want to listen just a bit to hear their story. For me, that does not always transfer into sales for them. For instance, OJ da Juiceman. Trap or Die at its best. Maybe at its worst all at the same time. He has a little "eehhh" that he uses for his adlib. Just draws me in. Maybe i am just special. BTW, big up to US Futbol. Nothing more than that on the radar tonight. Will be heading to the Beer Garden this weekend, BK movie fest, TJ and Dave and a few lounges. Rocking out with Crooked Disco on Saturday at Le Poisson Rouge. Big Up.

I have yet to check out this spot although i was invited too several birthday parties at these places. Sorry at did not make it there. My apologies especially to my friend Alex since she came out to my birthday party. She always comes through to my events so i have to give a big hug to her for the support. I saw some of the Djs coming through to the lounge, i will have to jump in there and get wild. BTW, i am putting an ad on craigslist and wherever to start an entourage.

So i was hanging with a friend of mine at Bambello's on Bleecker street. Ok Mexican food, nice atmosphere and good sangria. During the conversation, we were able to stop periodically and view the Michael Jackson Memorial. Mostly seeing his daughter say her words over and over again. Even in the death, he healed the world for at least one day. As we drank more sangria and took up space, we chatted about music, jobs and life in general. The funniest moment came when my friend said She volunteers for a soup kitchen. She knows several homeless people because of the soup kitchen even the professional homeless people. I said "Professional"? Confused look on my face. She said yes, professionals. Now i am little giggly from the drinks but i did not know you could go pro in the homeless field. She continues they are the ones who never go back or never want to get out. They love their freedom, they space they live, the outdoors, the people that look at them and more. Maybe i will become homeless. I get free food, time on my hands, i can see the outside and travel the world. Ok, maybe not travel the world.

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself. ~Thomas Paine

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Rhymes and Reasons I penned today's post for YPulse.com Follow the link for the entire post.

Is Hip Hop dead? Nas thinks so, Honda doesn’t. Which is why Honda has set its sights on the trendsetting urban crowd. And to close in on this target, Honda recently launched a Hip Hop inspired campaign “Rhymes and Reasons” featuring a 30-second TV ad designed to drive traffic to a branded microsite where underground artist, Mickey Factz and his co-host, DJ Gomez Warren IV discuss taking control of your finances.

My first thought… Mickey Factz seems like a good choice. He’s definitely niche, but he’s relevant to this target audience. He has a day job and a side hustle. In essence, he represents the hard-to-reach guy Honda’s mainstream marketing doesn’t traditionally reach. My next thoughts require a little Reasoning... check for them after the jump.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Despite all the hoopla around the crap that is on the radio, there are cats out here doing the "real" hip hop that people know and love. And yes, some of them are lyrical. We have the new school and the old school. The fresh styles are coming back which is blinding out the black t-shirts of the past. I guess the complaining has helped. Check out the music of Slaughterhouse, Mickey Factz, Brik Mason, Fresh Daily, Ced Hughes and Asher Roth to name a few. I have bumped the Drake mixtape for a minute and the buzz is warranted. Hope he does not lose the magic. Btw, Malik Yoba is on Miami:CSI. Oh you sly guys, NY:Undercover needs to come back.

I have been studying the buildings of the world recently and how they have amazed my eyes is unimaginable. From Gehry to Wright to Maki have influenced my thought process. Unfortunately their visions are not always appreciated and sometimes money runs the game. Ask every rapper. That leads me to my next discovery. The destruction of a short lived historical building in japan for white collar workers. Check out the news article below.

Those are the questions that instantly come to mind over the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s historic Nakagin Capsule Tower.

A rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence, the 1972 Capsule Tower is in a decrepit state. Its residents, tired of living in squalid, cramped conditions, voted two years ago to demolish it and are now searching for a developer to replace it with a bigger, more modern tower. That the building is still standing has more to do with the current financial malaise than with an understanding of its historical worth.

Yet for many of us who believe that the way we treat our cultural patrimony is a fair measure of how enlightened we are as a society, the building’s demolition would be a bitter loss. The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.

Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan’s transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.

Of the five members who made up the group, Kurokawa was the most glamorous. A photo taken in 1958 at a Moscow student conference, when he was just 24, shows him surrounded by fawning girls, signing autographs. Trim and handsome, often outfitted in elegantly tailored suits and a bow tie, he became a regular at Tokyo nightclubs. His Space Capsule Disco, opened in the 1960s, was a hot spot for young creative types.

The Nakagin Capsule Tower was completed as the movement’s influence was beginning to wane. Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.

Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath.

Part of the design’s appeal is voyeuristic. The portholes evoke gigantic peepholes. Their enormous size, coupled with the small scale of the rooms, exposes the entire apartment to the city outside. Many of the midlevel units look directly onto an elevated freeway, so you are almost face to face with people in passing cars. (On my first visit there, a tenant told me that during rush hour, drivers stuck in traffic often point or wave at residents.)

But the project’s lasting importance has more to do with its structural innovations, and how they reflect the Metabolists’ views on the evolution of cities. Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.

In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

NEW YORK � Former music manager Allen Klein, a no-holds-barred businessman who bulldozed his way into and out of deals with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, has died.

A publicist for Klein�s company, ABKCO Music & Records, said Klein died Saturday at his New York City home of Alzheimer�s disease. He was 77.

Klein became one of the most powerful figures in music world in the 1960s. Known for his tenacity in tracking down royalties and getting better record deals, he garnered clients including Sam Cooke, Bobby Darin and Herman�s Hermits.

But he was most famous for signing on the Rolling Stones and then the Beatles. Both arrangements eventually spurred lawsuits, with some Beatles fans blaming Klein for contributing to the tensions that broke the Beatles apart.

With no other bidders emerging for Midway Games, Warner Bros. has bought most of the company’s assets for $33 million, including the “Mortal Kombat” franchise as well as the company’s legacy arcade games, such as “Joust” and “Spy Hunter”.Mkvsdc

The bankruptcy judge overseeing the sale apparently wasn’t swayed by Threshold Entertainment’s argument that film producer Larry Kasanoff was the driving creative force in the franchise. (The Chicago Tribune quotes the judge as saying the objections, as well as those of Vin Diesel-owned development studio Tigon Games were ‘resolved’.

A pair of development studios that Warner opted not to buy will be shuttered in just under two months if no bidders emerge for them. The Newcastle studio has worked on the “Wheelman” franchise, while the San Diego studio has created the “TNA” games. Warner did purchase rights to the “Wheelman” games, but not the development studio behind it.

Warner picked up some valuable assets at firesale prices in this deal. Expect another “Mortal Kombat”/DC crossover in the years to come and possibly some re-imaginings of classic titles. The company has been beefing up its video game division steadily over the past few years and has managed to assemble some talented teams. It should be interesting to see what they do with some of the licenses they now own.

“I guess I’d be called the digital immigrant and my kids are the digital natives,” said Ms. Hesse, who in addition to being a mother to three teenagers is an installation artist and the director of artistic services and programs for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.

She said she was a lot like others in the late boomer generation, “trying to learn how to not be left in the dust with the new technology.” But she may be ahead of the pack in employing social networking as the theme for an art show.

“I didn’t even know how other artists were using it when I had the idea,” she said. “I was curious.”

That curiosity has yielded “Status Update,” an exhibition named for Facebook’s popular communication format. Nearly 50 works from more than a dozen artists will be on display through Aug. 1 at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, a private nonprofit group affiliated with Yale and the University of Connecticut that specializes in communication: mainly speech, language and reading research.

Haskins has held exhibitions with the arts council for several years, but this one was designed specifically to dovetail with its mission, which now includes research on student learning in a digital age.

As a direct result of the show, Philip Rubin, chief executive of Haskins, started a Facebook page for Haskins. “There’s money and fun and excitement to be made” if art can manage to stay abreast of technological innovation, he said. “But you’ve got to have a little sense of style, art and design in this thing.”

“Status Update” has turned out to be a somewhat unlikely intersection of digital concepts and conventional art.

Ms. Hesse curated the show almost entirely through Facebook, with the help of Donna Ruff, a Brooklyn artist. She found two categories there, she said: “Artists that are using it as a medium, performing in it, using it as poetry, using it as a canvas. And then artists that are commenting on it as a new form and creating new dialogues about what this means in our lives.”

In the former category is a piece by Rachel Perry Welty done on an iPhone into which the artist entered a status update every minute for 16 hours, and another by Lee Walton that is a series of about 50 videos illustrating status update posts from his friends. In the latter category are paintings and drawings that use social networking as inspiration, like the series of decidedly old-media abstract paintings by Cat Balco that are meant to represent communication at the cellular level.

Between the two categories are people like Ms. Hesse, whose string installation uses the idea behind Facebook’s “friend wheel” feature to represent connections made through the show, and Keith Johnson of Hamden, who did not use the very thing that is central to his art — a camera — to make his two photographic entries. Both Mr. Johnson’s pieces, “99 KJS” and “18 Domiciles,” are compilations of images from Google.

“A couple of years ago, for some reason, I went to Google Images and typed in my name to see what images of mine were floating around the ether,” Mr. Johnson said. What he found were images of lots of people also named Keith Johnson. He used 99 of them — including himself — in the piece. “18 Domiciles” is a series of Google Earth representations of all the places he has lived.

Mr. Johnson, 60, says that as long as he does not give up the kind of observation he believes is critical in photography, he will experiment in the digital, social networking world, but that he is not sold on it.

“It’s easy and it’s curious and it’s a different take on what photography is,” he said. “I’m much more interested in making pictures than sitting in front of a computer.”

Matt Held, a Brooklyn artist who has become something of a Facebook phenomenon through his oil paintings of Facebook photos, is already worried that his success will typecast him. He has done about 50 paintings since late last year. The subject gets a digital photo of the portrait and the right of first refusal to buy it. But he is cutting himself off at 200, despite having more than 3,700 requests and, as he says, “source material to last me till the cows come home.”

“Most social network sites — they’re hot for a while,” he said. “I don’t want to be the guy doing Facebook portraits when they’re not relevant anymore.”

Like many artists, Mr. Held, 37, finds Facebook and the Web invaluable for keeping up with other artists and their activities as well as providing a virtual gallery. But as art, the medium is not always clear.

“Is it art to do art on an iPhone and put it on an easel?” he asked. “If you go back to Duchamp and put a toilet on the wall — is it art? Yes, it is.”

Jeremiah Teipen’s “Social Network” explores what he calls the “visual gluttony of the Web” in a video that cascades with rapidly changing multiple images gathered from Google Image searches.

“That’s very much what people do with social networking sites,” said Mr. Teipen, 34, who is making a career out of new-media art. Artists are “curating the Web with quotes from someone, with song lyrics they like, video they found, a photo they thought was funny. It expresses identity through found media.”

Identity through social media is also the core of An Xiao’s work. Trained in philosophy, Ms. Xiao, 25, came to art through photography, writing and an interest in communication that goes back to her childhood, when she wrote letters to her grandmother in the Philippines. The letters, she said, related little moments that add up to a portrait of the writer, the way social networking does now with a series of — as she put it — “totally inane things.”

Her installation, called “Nothing to Tweet Home About,” is a group of postcards written as Twitter feeds that she is mailing to the gallery. “Sometimes I take the slow bus just to get a seat. And talk on the phone,” she wrote on one from New York.

“The mediums change,” she said in a telephone interview. “But the basic human need to communicate, to share your life and talk about your life — that’s going to be there forever.”

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills.More About This Movie

The thrills are certainly there in the sensationally choreographed prison break that opens the movie under a bright blue Midwestern sky that stretches across the wide screen like a cathedral ceiling. Dappled by fluffy white clouds, it is the kind of sky that tends to show up as a backdrop in paintings of the Madonna and Child, but here offers a sharp contrast to the long-distance image of Dillinger and his friend Red (Jason Clarke), quickly striding toward an enormous, looming prison. Mr. Mann goes in closer once the men enter the prison, where they help disarm the guards, and he pulls back again for the long view as Dillinger fires on the prison with a machine gun while the escapees make a run for the getaway car.

By force of Hollywood habit, you might expect that this vision of the suddenly lone gunman would serve as a prelude to another exciting joy ride about living fast and dying young. Instead it’s followed by a striking short scene of a wounded escapee being dragged alongside the speeding car while Dillinger and another man struggle to pull him up. In the most startling shot, Mr. Mann places the camera right next to the fallen man, pointing it up at Dillinger’s dark, ominous figure as he almost blots out that blue sky. Dillinger holds on until the man’s grip wilts, the dead body slipping away in one direction as the car races off in the other. Laying the blame elsewhere, he next tosses another man out of the moving car.

This, then, is Mr. Mann’s Dillinger: brave enough to stand his ground, loyal, ruthless. There’s a hint of the demonic in this portrait, particularly when the outlaw is gliding through a bank, his long, dark coat fanning around him and a tommy gun in one hand. This is the stuff of legends, of shoot-’em-ups and matinee gangsters with jaunty smiles. Mr. Mann loves this apparition of calculated bravura and initially he frames the first few heists as seamlessly choreographed set pieces. During the first robbery he shows Dillinger and two accomplices from high overhead, the camera peering straight down as the men fan across a black-and-white bank floor like MGM dancers. When Dillinger leaps across a railing, he soars.

It’s a seductive moment — the bad man seems to be defying gravity, not just the law — and much like the other action scenes, it gives the movie a jolt. It also, perhaps in homage, mirrors a similar shot of the escaping serial killer in David Fincher’s “Seven.” Like Mr. Fincher, Mr. Mann makes big-budget art movies that because of their complex pleasures and ambiguities, don’t always hit the box office sweet spot (“Seven” and “Collateral,” Mr. Mann’s movie with Tom Cruise, being exceptions). Despite Mr. Mann’s mainstream bona fides, notably with the 1980s hit TV show “Miami Vice,” and preference for muscular cinematic genres, there’s something resolutely noncommercial about his movies. Among other things, they’re deeply serious (at times to the edge of parody), which is why they rarely pop.

And “Public Enemies” is nothing if not serious, a vividly realistic if fictionalized portrait of a country deep in depression and jumping with bad men. The story centers on two dramatic antagonists, Dillinger and Melvin Purvis (a remote Christian Bale), the F.B.I. agent who doggedly, if often ineptly, led the hunt for America’s most wanted. At first the bureau’s young chief, J. Edgar Hoover (a terrific Billy Crudup, his neck thickened and delivery clipped), ignored Dillinger, deeming him a state problem. Hoover would have been spared embarrassment if the outlaw had remained out of federal jurisdiction because, when the chase was on, it was with agents who didn’t know how to conduct a stakeout or properly fire their guns.

Like Dillinger, Hoover cultivated a public profile that looked good on paper and later up on the screen. They had a lot of competition. Bonnie and Clyde were running wild, as were Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and other hoods with marquee-ready stories, some of whom make appearances here. Banks made for easy targets, logistically and otherwise, and, as the writer Bryan Burrough points out in a book about America’s inaugural war on crime, these outlaws took advantage of the public’s hatred of those recently failed institutions. Dillinger raided bank vaults and staged prison breaks to increasing approval. He shot one man to death, though didn’t always own up to the killing. It was bad for his image.

He became another kind of America’s most wanted: a star. “Get me the money, Honey,” he instructed one female teller with his crooked smile. The press raised his profile with screaming headlines, and the comic Will Rogers joked about the ineptitude of the authorities. (They were going to shoot Dillinger, Rogers joked, but “another bunch of folks came out ahead; so they shot them instead.”) Mr. Mann, working with incidents drawn from Mr. Burrough’s “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34,” underscores the celebrity angle. But that’s only part of the big picture sketched out in his ambitious screenplay, written with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, which also makes room for a love story amid the blazing guns and tabloid glory.

The relationship between Dillinger and a hatcheck girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, holding her own in this man’s world) eats up considerable time, sometimes winningly, though both actors are better when they’re apart. When not in pirate drag, Mr. Depp can be a recessive, even inscrutable screen presence, which is crucial to his strengths and performative limits. He’s a cool cat, to be sure: veiled and often most memorable when he’s staring into space while the camera soaks in his subdued but potent physical charms. He might have made a great silent star, as earlier roles suggest. Part of his initial appeal was that he seemed almost Garboesque in a movie world that increasingly makes no room for sacred idols.

Mr. Depp looks good as Dillinger — few contemporary actors can wear a fedora as persuasively — but the performance sneaks up on you, inching into your system scene by scene. The same holds true of “Public Enemies,” which looks and plays like no other American gangster film I can think of and very much like a Michael Mann movie, with its emphasis on men at work, its darkly moody passages, eruptions of violence and pictorial beauty. Mr. Mann’s digital manipulations, in particular, which encompass almost pure abstraction and interludes of hyper-realism, is worthy of longer exegesis, one that explores how this still-unfamiliar format is changing the movies: it allows, among other things, filmmakers to capture the eerie brightness of nighttime as never before.

“Public Enemies” doesn’t look like the usual gangster picture, not only because it’s been shot in digital, but also because Mr. Mann is searching for a new kind of gangster story to fit the times, one that makes room for greater ambivalence, and lawmen and outlaws who are closer to one another in temperament and deed. If he doesn’t fully succeed, it’s because he knows that the gangster’s rakish smile is at once a fiction of cinema and one of its great, irresistible lies. During the big finish, Dillinger grins wryly at a black-and-white Hollywood picture with Clark Gable as the kind of gangster who could only have been invented by the movies, a gangster who is as false as the bullets that finally stopped Dillinger were real.

SITTING at a Father’s Day barbecue on the day before a sold-out three-night stand at the Wiltern Theater here, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco was talking about his 14-year-old son, Spencer, a drummer in a rock band called the Blisters. Over the past five years Mr. Tweedy, the son of a railroad worker from St. Louis, whose toes touched bottom on the way to rock greatness, had come to an understanding about himself that applies to Spencer too: “I told him: ‘You are not a rock star. You get to do rock star things.’ ”

In his button-down shirt and with a Brewers cap hiding a mop of hair while he talked in a borrowed office a few steps from a friend’s party, he couldn’t have seemed less the alt-rock god. Still, it took him some painful years to find a place to stand between the nice guy at the barbecue and the bandleader at the Wiltern.

The success of Wilco’s current tour — the reviews have been ecstatic — and his satisfaction with the band’s splendid new record, “Wilco (The Album),” are fine and all. But Mr. Tweedy, 41, seems to care most deeply that he has finally reconciled his musical ambitions with more personal ones: to live in Chicago, be part of both a family and a band, remain sober (it’s been five years since he kicked a punishing addiction to painkillers) and live out a simulacrum of normalcy.

The family picnic backdrop for the interview was less a matter of media management than a reflection of how he rolls these days. No longer the tortured artist on the bus whose only steady companions were pills and the demons they were meant to tame, Mr. Tweedy keeps his tour jaunts short and his family close. His two kids pop in and out while he visits with a reporter, and he seems most at ease when they or his wife, Sue Miller, are at hand.

It’s not that he wears the success and stability like a loose garment — he’s a pretty complicated guy on a good day — but unlike the rock trope that only chronic agony produces important music, the absence of mayhem has been good for the work, he says.

“I was never at my best when I was at my worst,” he said, looking out the window as his sons — Spencer and Sam, 9 — bounce and laugh on a diving board. “When I did do good stuff in the past, it was because I was able to transcend the parts of my being that weren’t healthy.”

Mr. Tweedy has a Midwestern lack of pretension that is easy to be around, but he is a less than voluble interview, not because he doesn’t try to answer questions, but precisely because he does. He cares about being understood but struggles to explain himself because, as all writers will tell you, happy is nice, but happy is hard to explain.

“I suppose because everything about my life is better, markedly so, I’m a significantly happier person — well, I’m not being very eloquent about it,” he said, pausing, and then continued: “Having a solid base allows you to look at darker things and actually think about them. I debate people about this suffering myth, this tortured artist stuff, and they almost never buy it.”

On the new album, which was released last week on Nonesuch, his lyrics still veer into the personally apocalyptic, but the fatalism is leavened by sweetness. The guy onstage at the Wiltern the next night — the one who used to keep a trash bucket offstage so he could vomit between songs — is no longer ruled by the migraines, the panic attacks and the drug jags that seemed to go with fronting one of alternative rock’s most consistent and respected bands. He seems like a regular guy having fun doing rock star things.

When Mr. Tweedy walked onstage at the Wiltern in front of 2,300 fans, most of them likely steeped in 15 years of band lore, no introductions were necessary. He made them anyway, choosing “Wilco (The Song)” from “Wilco (The Album)” as the opening number for Wilco the band.

“This is an aural open arms, a sonic shoulder to cry on; Wilco, Wilco will love you baby,” Mr. Tweedy sang in a direct address rare for rock. After the years of tumult that became a backbeat to Wilco’s music, a big old hug seemed in order.

“I think they called it ‘Wilco (The Album)’ because this band knows who they are, and they are ready to own that identity in a very confident way,” said Rita Houston, the music director of WFUV, a progressive radio station in New York.

Preparations at the new Beach at Governors Island, which is set to open July 11 with a concert by Dark Star Orchestra, include building a food concession area and spreading 300 tons of sand.

It was the third year of concerts in McCarren Park Pool, the disused 1930s public swimming hole on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border, and they had begun to feel like an institution. Each Sunday afternoon the shows drew thousands of the young and fashionably dressed, yet the buzz-kill of mortality hung over them: McCarren was destined to become a real pool again, so the parties needed to find a new home. But where?

After months of scrambling with city and state authorities, Jelly, the promotion company behind the Pool Parties, has just announced this summer’s series, at East River State Park, an appropriately raw seven-acre stretch of the Williamsburg waterfront. The shows — all of them free, thanks to the very visible participation of corporate sponsors — will begin July 12, with Mission of Burma as the headliner, and continue each Sunday through Aug. 30.

The bad news: no more Slip ’N Slide.

The good news is that there’s more good news about this summer’s concert season. In addition to the long-running, blue-chip series like Central Park SummerStage and Celebrate Brooklyn!, which have already begun, this week funkier events like Seaport Music at South Street Seaport return. Thanks to the ingenuity and one-upmanship of local concert promoters, yet more concerts are turning up in the most unusual and amazing places.

Perhaps the most amazing, and certainly most unusual, is Governors Island, the former military base that has been under gradual transformation into an arts and recreation area. A major new concert space begins there this summer: the Beach at Governors Island, which opens July 11, with the Dark Star Orchestra, a fastidiously faithful Grateful Dead tribute band. Bookings continue into October, with the B-52s, Mos Def and Erykah Badu.

The Beach, on the north side of Governors Island, features an actual beach, or at least a kind of sandbox, with 300 tons of sand imported from Long Island. Its biggest attraction, however, is the view, one of the most awesome in the city, with the towers of Lower Manhattan shooting into the sky just a few thousand feet away and the full expanse of New York Harbor all around.

For a certain kind of music fan, though, the biggest news is the return of the Pool Parties, which for three years functioned as both an important concert series and a social nexus. With the help of the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn, a nonprofit group that works in partnership with the Parks Department, East River State Park was secured for the concerts as part of a broader plan to keep the indie and eclectic spirit of McCarren alive.

The riverside park and its surrounding area, like McCarren Park, is emblematic of the area’s cultural and economic evolution. A former shipping terminal, the lot fell into neglect and squalor, and was eventually acquired by the state. Half green and half concrete, it still has the feel of an industrial-era ruin, but all around it are luxury apartment buildings, so new that some are still under construction.

For the concerts there will be room for 6,000 on two long concrete slabs, plus space for 1,500 or more on the surrounding grass, said Stephanie Thayer, the executive director of the alliance. The bookings are strong, with indie-rock stars like the Black Lips, Dirty Projectors, Fiery Furnaces, Girl Talk and Grizzly Bear. Unlike previous years, though, there will not be ticketed shows by big promoters like Live Nation and AEG Live. And this year’s concerts arrive with an expiration date: after this summer another spot must be found.

For months the lineup for this year’s Pool Parties has been the worst-kept secret in the local music scene. But most fans don’t know the difficulties that stood in the way, and how close the concerts may have come to not happening.

In an interview Sarah Hooper, 28, and Alexander Kane, 33, the owners of Jelly (formerly known as JellyNYC), explained their plans for the Pool Parties. When they put the first season together in 2006, they had experience with club shows but nothing on such a scale. They knew they had a phenomenon on their hands midway through the first summer once they checked Craigslist the day after a packed Deerhoof show. “There were all these missed connections from people at the pool: ‘I saw you by the Slip ’N Slide,’ ” Ms. Hooper said with a hearty laugh.

They had an ambitious plan to expand to San Francisco this summer and booked eight weekends there. But those shows were abruptly canceled, and Ms. Hooper and Mr. Kane say they lost $150,000. They blame prohibitively high expenses, but also hint at conflicts with local promoters in San Francisco. “We were definitely the new kids on the block,” Ms. Hooper said, “and that doesn’t always go so well.”

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

And here are some Reason-able tips for effective networking during a conference.

1. Have a conversation. I know easier said than done. Don’t just ask for a business card. I was recently in a conversation with someone at a conference and a guy walked up to us and said, “hello, don’t mean to interrupt but can I have your card.” I’m thinking, what’s the point. What are you gonna say when you email us… you didn’t make an impression when you had a chance. Which leads to my next tip. 2. Make notes on business cards. When you do follow-up and reach out post-conference, you should be able to point to something unique about your conversation 3. Your Approach. Most people can breeze through the ‘About Us’ section of their website without taking a breath. While that’s cool and all, you can add more value by describing your business in one sentence and then speaking to your unique approach. We all have big names on our client list so differentiate yourself by speaking to your unique approach to solving marketing challenges. 4. Can we work together? After explaining what you do, you might as well force the issue. Ask about current projects they’re working on and inquire about process for new vendors. 5. 2 ears, 1 mouth. At conferences, you should be listening, twice as much as talking. Why… because you’re prospecting. You can create a proposal in a few days after you’ve gained some insight into your prospective clients needs. 6. Table lean. If you’re not the type to introduce yourself when you arrive at a table then do the old ‘lean with it, rock wit it’ move where you tell the people sitting to your left and right that you can’t see their name tag. Then introduce yourself and find out what they do. 7. Shrug off the cold shoulder. This is my last piece of advice. Some folks may just not be into what you’re talking about. It’s all good… just move on.

Aubrey Graham aka Drake is raking in the charts without an album but with mixtapes. Discussions over his buzz are ranging from 50 Cent to Biggie. Not sure if we are there yet but he has just signed with Young Money. Love that video....

Watching Futbol is awesome especially since the Confederate Cup(no Ricky Martin) just ended and the World Cup in South Africa coming up. Getting reports left and right. Any news from the world of Futbol is appreciated. BTW, Futbol is played with your feet.

hey, if you know what a Kill Fee is, hit me up. Recently i was told that WALE has jumped into the movies in more ways than one. According to my sources, he will be seen in a film with AJ from Wanted Fame. We will see......

It’s not surprising to see a Cuban timba band playing Bach. Timba is aggressive and full of ideas; its players shoulder Afro-Cuban grooves but add spaghetti junctions of ornament on top, including Bach quotations. And most of the best bands in timba come from the Cuban conservatory system, so Baroque music runs deep in their learning.Skip to next paragraphEnlarge This ImageMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Tiempo Libre, a seven-member band originally from Cuba, playing above Columbus Circle.BlogArtsBeatArtsBeat

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This is why Tiempo Libre’s new album, “Bach in Havana” (Sony Classical), doesn’t sound like a stunt. A little cute and eager to please, but not a stunt. The septet of Cuban musicians who have relocated to Miami — the group advertises itself as “the first authentic all-Cuban timba band in the United States” — makes its ambitions plain: it wants to spread timba to United States audiences who have no experience with it.

On Tuesday at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, where Tiempo Libre appeared for two sets as part of its summer tour of colleges and festivals like Tanglewood and Ravinia, the music was both classical and populist. The band circled around a guaguancó Minuet in G (in four-beat rhythm, not three); gave the opening lines of the Cello Suite No. 1 to the electric bassist Tebelio Fonte in “Baqueteo con Bajo” before breaking into a montuno; and folded Sonata in D minor into a cha-cha, in which the fugue part, played on keyboard by Jorge Gómez, worked in a call-and-response relationship to jazzlike horn-section arrangements.

But Tiempo Libre also played “The Star-Spangled Banner” — part of the band’s song “Arroz con Mango,” about the double-consciousness of being grateful both to Cuba and the United States — and a version of “Guantanamera,” encouraging audience members to sing the refrain. Through the set, ghastly synthesizer tones spoke in the worldwide language of soft pop; brass counterpoint and the strong, serene groove of the drummer, Hilario Bell, were reminders that you were listening to something irreducibly Cuban.

Above all Tiempo Libre wanted to engage the audience — make it sing and move and react. The band always points, at least, toward a dance music of sophistication and abandon, but playing that music to seated audiences who don’t know the cues doesn’t always create the desired effect.

The group had to work a little bit harder. So the singer, Joaquín Díaz, came down from the stage with three other frontline members during the funk-timba “Manos Pa’rriba” (“Hands in the Air”) for synchronized dancing. And in “Tu Conga Bach,” the horn players started a dance line that threaded around the club. It took a while, but the room warmed up.

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